153: "We are touching objects more often than we hold each other. What is being lost in this thing-world?"
157: "But it strikes me that, visual questions aside, there are a lack of good stories today for either men and women - particularly concerning intimacy. Masturbation with pornography creates a particular kind of loop, one that by definition excludes the other : are we, then, in a relationship only with ourselves? Even if we 'match' with another via an app, we might simply end up mediating our masturbation through the body of the other. What is specific and unique about our encounters disappears if everything is formulated in advance"
article by Kate Julian: "Why are young people having so little sex?"
Young gen staying in education longer, more debt. 40 is the new 20!
"Julian's research involved listening to multiple theories about the 'sex recession': "I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, or surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropped testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator's golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido"
The French Revolution, excess then the Reign of Terror, then a balanced period. Our Terror period was #MeToo
Sex has become screen-based
161: "All pornography reveals what philosopher John Locke realized but hoped he could hold off with the promise of God. He argued that our bodies are our 'own' (i.e. our property, with which we can do what we like), but we should avoid treating them badly because they are also the property of God. Capitalism is therefore Locke without God. The body is everything, but we exist only insofar as we exist as beings that can capitalize on our sexual existence. What resistance is possible when the 'revolution' itself claims freedom as its own? Nevertheless, despite its domination, pornographic capitalism does not have the monopoly of liberty"
51: "Gender is the name we give to the expectations society has of us. In recent years, however, the use of this word has shifted: we've moved from an idea of gender as something imposed from the outside (i.e. the expectation that girls/boys and men/women should behave in certain ways) to an idea of gender as something felt internally, or as something that could be claimed as an identity. The first position understands that gender is something to get beyond, I.e. that we collectively need to open up the possibilities of expressing oneself however one wants, but this approach does not deny the underlying reality of sexual difference (important for, among other things, understanding how our bodies actually work)"
98: "For better or worse, the sexually liberated, egalitarian moment may have peaked. What does this mean for sex in the future? If sex is something to do with pleasure, and our 'identity' is something to do with our sexual being, then we are all reduced to walking declarations of desire. We live in an age in which the fusion of a certain kind of consumerism is perfectly compatible with the harnessing of this model of desire, which is to say, desire becomes nothing other than consumption"
Article by Phil Christman, "What is it like to be a man?"
117: "For Christman, to be a man is to undertake the activities that stem from a fear that simple usefulness is not enough,; that one must train and prepare for eventualities one has no reason to anticipate, must keep one's dwelling and grooming spartan in case of emergencies, must undertake defensive projects that have no connection for the actual day-to-day flourishing of the people one loves. What if we could connect back up this almost comically stoical, ascetic masculinity to the 'day-to-day' flourishing of others? Masculinity does not have to become redundant, then, but rather it can be held always in reserve, and can be compatible with the flourishing of others, as Christman notes....for men to opt out of all positive ideas of masculinity is for them to accept the incredibly debased terms of a world that encourages an absence of though and feeling towards others. To care is also to be strong, to be brave"
117: "Second-wave feminists pointed out that gender roles imposed on boys and girls were often highly restive and destructive to both sexes. Their solution was not to deny the reality of sexual dimorphism but rather to work to positively expand the categories of gender expression..."
We homogenize and pasteurize our relationship through matching technology. We project an idealized image of ourselves and of the other person: fun guy, bad boy, husband....
The French novelist Michel Houellebecq discusses sexual injustice, men lacking female contact or men who pay for sex. Concerned with a world without sex not with a world with sexual liberation.
170: "We live in a time, as Houellebecq suggests, after the sexual liberation of the 1960s, in which we do not really know what to do. The market has become the model for everything: romance is treated as much like an economic exchange as possible. In the world of the manosphere, men and women each have an 'SMV' (Sexual Market Value) and women are seen as hypergamous - always seeking to 'marry up', to a man who has a higher social and sexual status than their own. This undoubtedly leads to some fairly derogatory thinking regarding women"
article by Amir Srinivasan, "does anyone have the right to sex?"
Relationship between sex-critical and sex-positive feminism shows that the market has permeated sex completely. Now it's about it being wanted or unwanted, not problematic or not. The norms of sex and the norms of capitalist free exchange are the same now. It's not about what conditions give rise to the dynamics of supply and demand - why some people need to sell their labour while others buy it - but that buyer and seller agreed to the transfer"
204: "There is no limit to the absurd and self-destructive behavior that capitalism permits, all the while telling you that this is the best you've ever had it, and that this is what you want....capitalism encourages a lack of self-restraint, a kind of perpetual toddler-like demand for things, along with the idea that people are also 'things"
208: "Rather than passively receiving meaning from the culture that surrounds us, which in any case is a confusing amalgam of conflicting demands and desires, we know, as the existentialists did, that we must make our own meaning if there is to be any sense at all"
13: "What I saw facing women in the 2000s was not blunt misogyny, but rather the opportunism of a culture sought to 'sell' feminism to women, and, against the backdrop of the closure of largely male-dominated industries, how workplaces were increasingly branded as 'female'....I think that we have moved to a new phase in this divide process, one that plays out less at the level of work and the economy, but more at the level of how we interact. This runs alongside the decline in the interest of class as a category in favor of privileging identity. It is no longer our relation to the means of production that matters - whether we are exploited for our labor - but rather how we identify, and wether our identity is a good one (and therefore uncriticizable) or a bad one (therefore open to being blamed)"